Here, I will be posting various musings on life, RPGs, philosophy (in the traditional sense, with Plato, Nietzche, etc.), perhaps religion (in terms of both RPGs and real life) and other (more or less) related topics. If you don't have a fondness for at least two-thirds of what I just wrote, now might be a good time to leave. If you are Chaotic, you might want to at least skip the next three paragraphs (the pictures are still interesting though), but then again, if you are Chaotic as defined by me further on in this post, I can't count on you staying Chaotic. It'll make sense later.
The first topic I'll be writing about is one that's been on my mind for a while now: Morality in D&D - specifically Law and Chaos. While a lot of threads on the internet (particularly those by elegan/tg/entlemen on 4chan) have discussed morality in D&D, Pathfinder and other d20 games with related morality axes, those mostly deal with the extremes: "What would a character of alignment X do if facing situation Y?" or "How can X be considered Always Evil when Y?" - all as if there is some hidden truth behind playing a successful aligned character, and as if that truth is plainly known, but not by the original poster. Alignment seems to be a way to only constrain the actions of your character - but is a part of a lot of D&D settings in ways that would make not only die-hard fans of the settings angry, but removing alignment altogether would also make various organizations and character classes (Paladins with Detect Evil, for instance) crumble and lose their meaning. The problem is quickly determined to be an error with the system itself (">playing RPGs with alignments") or determined to not be a problem at all, but rather a case of GM interpretation and houseruling. A way to lessen alignment extremism might also be to simply use an alignment system that has more options than "extremely good," "not good" and "anti-good" - Alignment Tendencies is a great example of this - but ultimately cannot solve the problem of supernatural Evil.
While the question in such a case is often "Why are all undead evil when sentient undead can perform good acts?" or "Does a paladin fall if he only has sexual intercourse with the succubus in order to convert it to become good?" (also known as Lawful Good Dickings), I won't be focusing on those. Good and Evil in those cases are not used by the game as points on a morality axis, but rather a point in a metaphysical axis: Alignment has metaphysical form in D&D, as is evidenced by the Outer Planes in the Great Wheel cosmology, and an undead creature is "Always Evil" because of the way that certain kind of undead is made, not because of how it chooses to act. There are exceptions to the rule about undead always being evil - Baelnorn are Good liches made with strange elf magicks, and Deathless are mummies made with Positive Energy instead of Negative Energy - and those exceptions make it clear that morality has nothing to do with it. If you are a clerical worshiper of an evil deity, you will detect as Evil (and so on for all alignments) - even if you are, in fact, merely Neutral - which can cause weird shenanigans (a regular undead cleric of a Good deity will detect as both Good and Evil). All of this is merely a case of people conflating game terms and characters motivations (in other words: conflating rollplaying with roleplaying), and can often be solved through simply speaking with your GM (assuming your GM has an Intelligence score of 8 or higher).
I cannot recommend Dresden Codak's "Dungeons And Discourse" (as well as the Advanced one) enough for people interested in D&D and philosophy.
No, the real issue with D&D's morality lies with the horizontal axis: Law and Chaos. By its very nature, Law and Chaos are harder to grasp than Good and Evil - when growing up, children learn of Good acts (charity, helping the elderly across the street, rescuing stray cats from trees) and Evil acts (stealing, telling lies, harboring a grudge) - but not Lawful or Chaotic acts. In some versions of D&D, Lawful and Chaotic are simply the extremes of Good and Evil (there is no "Lawful Neutral" or "Chaotic Good"), and depending on your real-life alignment, you might think of Good acts being inherently Lawful or Chaotic, with the other being an inherent factor for Evil acts. The terms are strange to a person who hasn't invested a lot of thought in moral philosophy (Lawful Good is often equated with deontology, Chaotic Good with consequentialism and Neutral Good with virtue ethics), and it makes for a strangely profound way of sneaking philosophy lessons into games of otherwise black-and-white situations. D&D and related games has since its beginning evolved to incorporate moral questions in greater capacity ("You find an orc baby - do you kill it, give it to a human family or raise and take care of it yourself?"), and its popularity has made one single inconsistency - one small flaw in its morality system - more important than it would have been, had it only been a game of killing dragons and rescuing fair maidens.
The flaw is simple: Law is not opposed to Chaos, and Chaos is not opposed to Law.
Let me explains myself. Personally, I believe that a lot of the confusion in regards to the Law/Chaos dischotomy arises because of the words themselves: When we say that a person is "Chaotic" in everyday life, what we mean is the antithesis of being "Orderly" - and so a Chaotic person is someone who doesn't plan out their actions, doesn't clean up after themselves, etc. When we say that a person is "Lawful" in everyday life, what comes to mind is a tendency to follow the rules imposed on oneself by the governing authority - the king or government of a nation, or the boss or superior in a workplace. Now, D&D has a lot more going for Law and Chaos in its version of the terms: Law means order, stability and following a code; Chaos means freedom, creativity and behaving unexpectedly. A serious problem with D&D's Chaos (in the sense that something Chaotic behaves unexpectedly) is that it is contradictory by nature: We are both saying that something Chaotic follows a specific tendency of action ("being Chaotic" is an action-defining label) while saying that it defies all action-defining labels. In a way, this is fitting, since "contradictory" is a label itself, and only negative if one is already what D&D would describe as Lawful. So the very word "Chaotic" is Chaotic.
The ancient Greeks had a way to divide existence in two: Cosmos and Chaos. Cosmos was order, and the way that the universe was supposed to run its course; Chaos was disorder, and the void that was before the universe came to be. From these terms, we now have the words "cosmic" and "chaotic" - but whereas "chaotic" now refers to something merely disorderly, "cosmic" has to do with the universe outside the Earth. Since "cosmic" is already being used as a term, macroscopic is an ample way of describing the Cosmic/Chaotic dischotomy - what we're discussing is the metaphysical nature of the universe, after all. On the other hand, Law is a consensual way to impose order on a microscopic level, opposed by something along the lines of anarchy or negative freedom: Law is an agreement made by finite beings and upheld by whoever wields power in a given society. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan is a great example of this.
The Leviathan being blue fits on more than one level, seeing as it is both the color of water and that of order, along with white. In reality, the card could probably be white and fit the color pie pretty well, if we're counting Elesh Norn as white instead of Phyrexian. And yes, the second ability is meant to be silly and old-fashioned, like that of Rock Hydra - hence the old frame.
While we can break and rethink the laws of our society, we cannot break and rethink those of the universe - and despite what the modrons think they might be acting in favor of, a Lawful being in D&D is never "Cosmic" simply by virtue of its alignment, since they are acting on behalf of a certain prescriptive belief ("The multiverse must be orderly and stable"). In that way, Lawful beings in D&D would be better opposed to "Anarchic" beings - but that would mean only defining the antithesis of Law as the antithesis of Law, and not as something of equal value. In other words: If Chaos disappeared, Law would still be the way society was conducted; If Law disappeared, what would Chaos be? Freedom would only ever be freedom from something (since positive freedom requires power granted by law to disrupt the natural state of social contract philosophy), and "Anarchy" follows the same way of definition. D&D's Chaos clearly has positive value beyond being the opposite of Law, though: We often associate creativity and self-management as virtues of being Chaos (the antitheses of which would be "thinking inside the box" and "following the pack" as results of Law). Is this enough, though? The problem I see with this is not only that Chaos becomes ill-defined in the absence of Law - it's that Chaos loses its meaning. Law can thrive on its own, but Chaos (which is ironically associated with self-sustainability) stagnates.
Perhaps, then, the problem is that Law, by its very definition, contains too much - perhaps the position that we call "Law" is better suited as the extreme in which everything is run like clockwork and never falters (the song Mother Machine by Delain comes to mind), while "Chaos" is the extreme that leads to reverting to the natural state. In this picture, civilized society is put in the middle - neither perfectly balanced and orderly, nor split into singular creatures hunting and gathering.
In order to bring a sense of cohesion into this picture, I will try to give what we know as Law and Chaos the terminological names they rightfully deserve, while maybe finding new uses for the old terms.
In real life, as in D&D, we often have two alternatives when choosing between ways to use power: We can either enact stability or enact freedom. This is often a question raised in politics: Do we want to pay more taxes, lowering the maximum gain while increasing the minimum? Or do we want to pay less taxes, increasing the maximum gain while decreasing the minimum? The former is the case of stability, while the latter is that of freedom - and thriving, working examples of both exist in today's society: The "welfare" politics of Scandinavia are clearly in favor of stability, while the "opportunity" politics of the US are in favor of freedom. But what do these terms mean, exactly?
- Freedom in this variant is a sort of negative freedom - lack of unnecessary control - and while it might not have a meaning in an abstract, absolute sense, it does have a rather important meaning in a society that is already governed by a massive amount of laws. We might also think of freedom in this sense as a positive freedom - the ability to choose our own lives. In regards to my previous explanation of the dischotomy of Cosmos/Chaos and Law/Anarchy, the negative freedom here is clearly freedom on a microscopic level (it has to do with consensual laws that can be broken and changed in a heartbeat), while the positive freedom has the potential to be freedom on a macroscopic level - if we start out in a natural state, and this state includes the laws of nature by which humans must live, then living in violation of these laws (by not killing and stealing whoever and whatever you are personally capable of, for instance) seems to be a violation of the very laws of the universe! This is only momentary, though, as the laws of nature are descriptive instead of prescriptive, and as such will change to describe humanity as a city animal rather than a wild animal as soon as it forms a society. Through freedom we have the ability to grow personally beyond our initial means, but only if the laws of society are nudged in the right direction - both in terms of negative and positive freedom. It often comes at the cost of those not able to use the laws correctly - or those exploited by others into accepting negative freedom without the hope of positive freedom (as is the case of many homeless).
- Stability in this variant is a way to describe a tendency towards assimilation, unification and centralization. Everything becomes easier to manage as long as there is a system with enough variables to explain, predict and solve every possible problem that occurs in society. When we say that "society has failed X," we are really saying that the society in this case wasn't stable enough to save X from the natural state. The positive aspects of a stable state might be that its inhabitants worry less, since more choices have already been made for them, and so Communism is the dream of ultimate stability. People require choices in order to make identities for themselves, however, and those identities often come at odds with the society in which the people live. So in the end, stable societies require meta-freedom in the sense that people are able to choose which society they want to live in. Stability as a less extreme version is still useful (all things in moderation), since it enables us to give everyone in society a fair shot - even those not already in a position to use it properly. On the other hand, stability incurs the risk of stagnation, and a stable society will often be less motivating for its inhabitants.
Freedom is what D&D would describe as Chaotic and Stability is Lawful. One problem with the terms (as they are presented by D&D) is that "Lawful" as opposed to something else often comes off as being the only way to have a society at all - "Without laws, where would we be?" - while "Chaotic" as opposed to something else comes off as being completely out of control and without moderation (the Dark Gods of Warhammer, for instance, are presented as personifications of Chaos in this sense) - however, what we really mean in these situations are that both "Lawful" and "Chaotic" societies do have laws and exist with moderation. This creates confusion, since laws and moderation are only within the bounds of Law itself, flagging otherwise Chaotic societies as Lawful. The entire problem with the terminology has probably arisen due to the previously mentioned way of how they were incorporated into the game: When "Good" became extreme, it was called "Lawful Good" because it was Good in a Lawful way, namely that of a person who is consistently Good, as if prescribed by law; When "Evil" became extreme, it was called "Chaotic Evil" because it was Evil in a Chaotic way, namely that of a being with no regard for life while also being unpredictable.
But what D&D actually did was this:
Society has nothing to do with consistency inherently, and the natural state does not contain or otherwise promote inconsistency. If anything, the natural state is consistent in its naturality, and society is only inconsistenly lawful, as some people are dissatisfied with it and break the laws.
However, when we forcibly connect Law with Order and Chaos with Individualism, we end up with the values that D&D meant to ascribe to Law and Chaos, respectively. The terms themselves were not enough to define their roles in morality, it seems, as Law could only be fully defined by combining the definition of Law with the antithesis of the definition of Chaos and vice versa. This is incredibly shoddy craftsmanship, and seems to cross the line associated with the naturalist's fallacy: Society and Individualism are both defined prescriptively (Society requiring one to act towards the good of all; Individualism requiring one to act towards the good of oneself) while Order and Chaos are both defined descriptively (either something is or it isn't consistent). Somewhere along the line, those two got blurred, and although Society indeed seems to attempty to turn the world more orderly, it is only on a microscopic scale: The scale on which the actions of individuals are determined. A problem arises when we have agents of the macroscopic scale: An agent of Chaos would have to be consistently inconsistent in order to be chaotic at all, but an agent of Individualism can be consistenly individualistic. The problem doesn't have an equal on the Order/Chaos scale, since all talk of alignment is an attempt to impose Order on the thoughts and actions of characters, after all.
So what are we left with? To me at least, Order and Chaos now both seem to be little more than a meta-version of Law and Individualism - the ways in which one can choose to be either Lawful or Individualistic. And to bring in what I mentioned earlier about Freedom and Stability, those are then the outer points of the Law/Individualism scale - defined as a higher or lower rate of regulation, resulting, respectively, in a version of society that is further aimed at Law (Equality) or Individualism (Freedom).
So to briefly sum up the points I've made in the above post:
- Law and Chaos operate on different scales: Law is opposed to Individualism and Chaos is opposed to Order.
- Chaos is contradictive. Contradition would be fine in a world with no real rules, but in a game governed by rules, it's a big no-no - because...
- We are agents of Order by virtue of having and playing by rules with which to regulate the thoughts and actions of characters.
- Politics already balance on a scale of what we think of as Law and Chaos from D&D - but these values are best described as Stability and Freedom, respectively, and operate on the same level as Law and Individualism.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, comments, criticism or anything else, feel free to write below.
